An abacus turn model for time/space-efficient reconfigurable routing

Applications' traffic tends to be bursty and the location of hot-spot nodes moves as time goes by. This will significantly aggregate the blocking problem of wormhole-routed Network-on-Chip (NoC). Most of state-of-the-art traffic balancing solutions are based on fully adaptive routing algorithms which may introduce large time/space overhead to routers. Partially adaptive routing algorithms, on the other hand, are time/space efficient, but lack of even or sufficient routing adaptiveness. Reconfigurable routing algorithms could provide on-demand routing adaptiveness for reducing blocking, but most of them are off-line solutions due to the lack of a practical model to dynamically generate deadlock-free routing algorithms.

In this paper, we propose the abacus-turn-model (AbTM) for designing time/space-efficient reconfigurable wormhole routing algorithms. Unlike the original turn model, AbTM exploits dynamic communication patterns in applications to reduce the routing latency and chip area requirements. We apply forbidden turns dynamically to preserve deadlock-free operations. Our AbTM routing architecture has two distinct advantages: First, the AbTM leads to a new router architecture without adding virtual channels and routing table. This reconfigurable architecture updates the routing path once the communication pattern changes, and always provides full adaptiveness to hot-spot directions to reduce network blocking. Secondly, the reconfiguration scheme has a good scalability because all operations are carried out between neighbors. We demonstrate these advantages through extensive simulation experiments. The experimental results are indeed encouraging and prove its applicability with scalable performance in large-scale NoC applications.